He has seen that there is a common case, which is “When you build a true web application, many people do so via the single page model”. If you take this assumption, wouldn’t it be nice to tag the top page as an application, and have the browser subsystem take care of caching files and using them correctly when offline. His assumption is based on the logic that: “If you have complicated server logic you use a multiple page application, which isn’t going to do much in an offline mode anyway, as it has complicated server logic!”.

Some people do not subscribe to this view, and think that there is a lot of multiple page applications that can be made to be web enabled, and so his latest thoughts take that into consideration.

The idea is that you can then <html application=”manifest-of-urls.txt”> and use a different path. He starts with:

Ok, new proposal:

There’s a concept of an application cache. An application cache is a group
of resources, the group being identified by a URI (which typically happens
to resolve to a manifest). Resources in a cache are either top-level or
not; top-level resources are those that are HTML or XML and when parsed
with scripting disabled have with the value of
the attribute pointing to the same URI as identifies the cache.

When you visit a page you first check to see if you have that page in a
cache as a known top-level page.

If you do, skip the next two paragraphs; the ‘new cache’ flag is set to
false.